Project Director Message
Changing climate, population pressure, increasing demand for fuelwood, fodder and other natural resources and many other anthropogenic drivers poses severe threats to natural resources and biodiversity thereby resulting into deforestation and forest degradation. One of the biggest challenges faced by humanity, therefore, is to manage natural resources in such a way that trade-offs between the increasing human needs and sustainability of ecosystem health are maintained.
The Ecosystem Services Improvement Project (ESIP) with financial support from the GEF Trust Fund and administered by the World Bank is being implemented in the states of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. The project is designed to support the Green India Mission (GIM) and aims at increasing forest and tree cover, improvement in ecosystem along with provisioning services like fuel, fodder, small timber and non-timber forest produces. ESIP also aims at enhancing forest-based livelihood opportunities of the stakeholders specially forests dwellers, small and marginal farmers living in forest fringe areas. By adding additional forest and tree cover, ESIP attempts to improve the quality of forest through better management of natural resources, reversing land degradation and conservation of biodiversity.
Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) is one of the project implementing agencies and is mandated to implement the component on scaling up of sustainable land and ecosystem management (SLEM) best practices besides the measurement and monitoring of forest carbon stocks and capacity building. The main objectives of project component on upscaling of SLEM practices are to prevent land degradation and desertification and to increase above-ground forest carbon stock through a combination of activities to implement and scale-up tried-and-tested SLEM best practices, to increase national capacity for monitoring land degradation, and to track associated indicators and generate knowledge exchange on SLEM approaches to benefit small and marginal farmers and other rural poor, enhance productivity on private and community land, building local knowledge and capacity on SLEM best practices.
ICFRE is developing a Road Map for Institutional and Policy Mainstreaming of Sustainable Land and Ecosystem Management in India under ESIP. The road map would provide specific guidelines to the line Ministries, Departments, Research Organizations, Civil Society Originations involved in combating land degradation and desertification. The road map also provides the guidelines and plans for achieving the LDN, SDGs and NDC targets w.r.t. India. ICFRE has developed an online National Reporting Database Portal (NRDP) for capturing trends and status of key progress indicators on land degradation and desertification and for up-scaling and mainstreaming SLEM best practices will help in strengthening the India’s reporting to UNCCD and combating DLDD in India. The NRDP would be used by number of stakeholders including various Central Ministries/ State Governments/ Departments/ Science & Technology Institutions, NGOs and others. NRDP would also work as a repository of knowledge on combating desertification, land degradation and drought. NRDP would also facilitate national reporting to UNCCD Secretariat and having national database on SLEM practices and practitioners for the development of institutional and individual networks. NRDP help in organizing and implementing learning events at the interface of the community, farm and common lands through the web-based platform.
I would like to request the users of NRDP to communicate their views to make the portal more user friendly and effective.
Smt. Kanchan Devi, IFS
Project Director